Supersuming Subsumption: Theory and Politics

Book excerpt: The main purpose of Supersuming Subsumption is to extrapolate from the Marxian understanding of subsumption — and the author's own socially historically situated reading of it — a dynamic and holistic theory of capitalist social power relations. The work brings this theory to bear on the anti-capitalist analysis of everyday practices. Despite a recent and renewed interest in the subject, subsumption remains a fairly under-explored category, used either as a ‘floating signifier’ to describe a vague and wide-ranging tendency of capital to colonise social life, or, alternatively, as a highly technical concept in the specialist literature on Marx's later writings. The present work aims to maintain the specificity of the concept while opening up its domain of application to the realms of everyday life and practical politics.